Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Unholy vs Blood

No, I'm not going emo or goth or anything like that. I'm talking about WoW.

Last night, me and my Death Knight Class Leader decided to have a little run on the training dummies in Ebon Hold. We were testing how the current Blood and Unholy specs fair out against one another. One went Unholy, the other Blood and then we swapped.

I went Unholy first and, being Blood all of my DK "career", I had some trouble with the new rotation. But eventually I caught up with it and even managed to hit the 5.1k mark (keep in mind this is without any raid buffs and target debuffs) for a bit, but averaged out at 4.5k. When I tried Blood, I achieved higher numbers, but that can be explained by being more used to it. My CL confirmed my observations.

I always knew that Blood was too "bursty", as in the majority of the higher numbers come from the huge dps spike we get every 90 seconds from the DRW (spikes in the order of 20k DPS are not that uncommon when the planets align themselves), but what I failed to realize is that the sustained damage is a bit way too low. Unholy builds in 3.3 can now greatly compensate for this and outperform Blood easily. Unholy doesn't have much burst, but it does have considerable sustained damage.

So I decided to raid with my new Unholy build and my CL went Blood. I was actually expecting that Blood would scale better with raid buffs, but apparently Unholy also got the upper hand on this. I easily reached the 7-8k margin and this is in ToC25 gear. I can only imagine the sort of scalling I will get once I farm Shadow's Edge and 2pT10. It might be just me, but the set bonuses in T10 just feel... awesome, especially after the 4pT9 nerf.

If you care for combat logs, here's the link to WoL: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/28j4suev4v0fdhr7/

I'll see you around! ;)
Kiauze

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